Woke up the dread voice of my wife shouting there's no electricity! Flip the bloody circuit breaker say I as I bury my head under the pillow. Where are they? Which one? I get up and do it myself because it's easier than 101 questions. Except it doesn't work. Every time I put the socket ring back on, ker-chink goes the main breaker. So I go around unplugging everything (and seriously, how much many things do we have that are greedy for electricity?), send the wife upstairs to do the same. But still, every time I flip on the ring, ker-chink. I start to see the bill for getting an electrician out on a Sunday, and the thought doesn't please me greatly.
You did unplug your computer, didn't you?
She didn't, the surge protector multiplug thing with the usual modern office cornucopia was still plugged in. Unplugging that made things good. Then I noticed it was sticky. Now the first thing my wife shouted at me this morning wasn't about the electric. It was about the cat being sick, which I pretended to ignore so well (on the grounds I didn't want to clean it up) that I'd actually forgotten. In her office. By my wife's desk. Can you guess where the multiplug is located? Basically, in addition to what was cleaned up, Bad Cat had also emptied the liquid contents of her stomach into an exposed socket on the multiplug.
I also discovered the labels on the RCD panel are lies. The upstairs and downstairs sockets are on the same breaker, the one labelled 'freezer' definitely isn't the freezer because that was off, and the sockets in the kitchen extension seem to be connected to the oven circuit. Neither of us have a clue where the dishwasher is wired in.
I'm going to wire Bad Cat to the mains.